It's Tuesday afternoon, just five days until the 88th Academy Awards. And yet, as you walk around the Dolby Theatre, the home of the Oscars, the preparations for Hollywood's biggest night are almost anticlimactically calm, streamlined and efficient. No one's running around with his hair on fire—no one's yelling frantically into a walkie-talkie. Sure, plenty could go wrong between now and Sunday night, but the impression one gets is of a massive undertaking that's being executed with cool confidence.

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Curt Behlmer, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Board of Governors who's also a Senior Vice President at Dolby, acknowledges the challenges of staging one of the year's biggest televised events. "You think about all the stuff that's happening to pull this show off," he says. "There's the live stuff in the venue, there's the orchestra, there's the video-clip packages, there's the audio-clip packages, there's the voiceover. I mean, it's just a lot of stuff that's all coming together."

But Behlmer isn't concerned about all the variables at play. Partly that's because the Oscars rely on a series of veteran technicians who have worked on the show for years, including about 270 crewmembers during the telecast. (In the hour or so that Popular Mechanics spend at the Dolby, we don't meet a single person who's working on his or her first Oscars.)

And then there's the consistency of the venue itself. The Academy has been holding the Oscars at the Dolby (originally named the Kodak Theatre) since 2002. Spanning 180,000 square feet, with an 86-foot ceiling and 3,400 seats, the gorgeous theater has played host to everything from Neil Young concerts to the Cirque du Soleil show Iris to the world premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But the Academy Awards are unquestionably the theater's main attraction, and while we weren't allowed access into the Dolby itself—the event organizers don't want to run the risk of any surprises from Sunday night's show going viral in advance—the chance to see some of the components that go into the event leaves one struck by the precision and organization needed to mount a pageant that reportedly reaches more than 225 countries.

One is struck by the precision and organization needed to mount a pageant that reportedly reaches more than 225 countries.

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The first stop on our guided tour may seem deeply unglamorous, but for the people at Dolby, it's of critical importance. That would be the broadcast sound truck located behind the venue that stretches about 53 feet—it's here where sound mixers, broadcast engineers and Oscar director Glenn Weiss will guide the show Sunday night over its three-hours-plus running time. From the outside, the truck is just a drab box, but once you go in, you're treated to a long, glowing console that consume one whole wall, a gearhead's wet dream of colorful nobs, dials and monitors.

Sitting behind that console is Paul Sandweiss, the show's lead sound mixer who has won Emmys for his sound work on the Academy Awards, the Grammys and the post-9/11 concert special America: A Tribute to Heroes. He has a thick notebook beside him with the detailed script for the Oscar telecast. The job he and his collaborators do is technical, demanding and difficult, including reconfiguring the sound for other countries depending on whether or not their populations are fluent in English. (Behlmer tells me that Sandweiss is so devoted to the tiny nuances of live sound during the broadcast that he won't really pay attention to host Chris Rock's jokes or what any of the winners say at the podium. "[After the broadcast is over] he goes home and watches the show," Behlmer says, "and that's the first time he actually listens to the words.")

"I always tell people, 'If you're going to get in this business, it's a lot of a fun, but it's not a business that accepts failure.' You have to be really good at what you're doing, and then you have to hit home runs for a long, long time."​

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Taking a quick break, the affable-but-serious Sandweiss says of his job, "I always tell people, 'If you're going to get in this business, it's a lot of a fun, but it's not a business that accepts failure.' You have to be really good at what you're doing, and then you have to hit home runs for a long, long time. When you have one bad outing, it takes you three-to-five years to recover from it. You know, things do go wrong—these are complex shows."

Part of Sandweiss's preparations for the Oscars concern expecting the unexpected. The sound trucks have their own power generators, and during each commercial break, Sandweiss will huddle with Weiss and others to see how the show is doing time-wise and if any last-minute changes to the program need to be implemented on the fly.

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Another added wrinkle this year: For the first time since 2012, the performers in the orchestra will be nestled inside the Dolby as opposed to piped in remotely from nearby Capitol Records. "They take up a lot of space—the last couple years, [the show producers] used that space for other things," acknowledges Gary Epstein, Dolby's product marketing manager of professional content tools. "But the audio people feel that it adds more dynamics to the show. And I think, personally, the orchestra probably connects better with the show when they're actually here—they really feel like they're a part of it. You know how performers are: When they are in the middle of something, they perform better. It may be subtle, but it matters."

Another added wrinkle this year: For the first time since 2012, the performers in the orchestra will be nestled inside the Dolby as opposed to piped in remotely from nearby Capitol Records.

After seeing how the evening's sound is finessed, we take a brief walk to the front of Hollywood & Highland, the entertainment complex that houses the Dolby, to observe the raised bleacher seats that have been already erected for approximately 745 lucky fans who will get to watch all the celebrities make their way to the theater.

However, the outside of the complex is still a work-in-progress five days before the telecast. Tomorrow is the unspooling of the Oscars' massive red carpet, leading from Hollywood boulevard all the way up to the Grand Staircase, which nominees, presenters and invited guests ascend to enter the Dolby.

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That carpet is approximately 500 feet long and 33 feet wide, and admittedly, the absence of its regal color makes the bland black scaffolding and milling-about construction workers lining the street look not quite as festive. But soon we're whisked inside the Dolby's cavernous lobby and toward what's known as Winners Walk, a private hallway that connects from the Dolby Theatre stage to the backstage area where Sunday night's winners will immediately address the press.

That hallway is lined with photographs of past winners, everyone from Gandhi'sBen Kingsley to Cabaret's Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey. It's hard to take in all the photos, though, because, to be honest, it's the first time on our tour where the actual grandeur and the history of the Academy Awards really hit you: The width of the hallway is just long enough to make it seem like a secret passageway to a magical world, a feeling no doubt some overwhelmed new Oscar winners have experienced after breathlessly exiting the stage and being escorted by Academy personnel to their interviews. (Adding to the day's grandeur, Dolby's representatives allowed journalists to hold Ray Dolby's actual 1988 Academy Award for Merit. As some Oscar winners have noted from the stage, yes, it's much heavier than expected.)

What becomes apparent is that there are two Oscar shows going on simultaneously Sunday: the one for the audience in the Dolby, and then the one for the much larger television viewership.

Throughout the tour, what becomes apparent is that there are two Oscar shows going on simultaneously Sunday: the one for the audience in the Dolby, and then the one for the much larger television viewership. Asked which one matters more, those interviewed stress that neither is prized over the other. "We've got 7.1 channel surround sound inside the theater, and 5.1 surround that's made available to people at home," Behlmer says. "Trying to take a consistent experience from the live venue to the consumer's home, that's a concern of ours."

During a separate chat, Sandweiss emphasizes the importance of entertaining viewers at home. But for him, the Dolby crowd's experience is inexorably linked to the TV audience's. "The first mix is for the performer to hear what they need to hear to do what they're doing," he says. "That's the most important thing to me. Then, [you have to think about] the people in the audience that are going to create your room tone—the sound of your show." This will be what Sandweiss and his team pay close attention to on Sunday, along with everything else.

And after Sunday? A week's worth of production—closing down blocks of Hollywood Boulevard, rolling out the red carpet, removing rigs and speakers to transform the Dolby from a movie theater into an Oscar venue—stops, and the whole operation goes back to normal in about a day. (Dolby brass brag that they can convert the venue back into a theater in approximately 14 hours.)

Just don't expect the Academy to take it easy once the ceremony is over and all those Oscars are handed out. Asked if she's able to breathe a sigh of relief after another mammoth awards show is in the books, an Academy spokesperson laughed. "We're back in the office 9 a.m. on Monday," she replied, and the process of planning for 2017 begins.